9 ms·

I 'm not sure how any rational account of Gates' legacy can be negative. He helped make computers affordable internationally, paving the way for their explosiv

I 'm not sure how any rational account of Gates' legacy can be negative. He helped make computers affordable internationally, paving the way for their explosive mass adoption. Even with internet explorer, it introduced the internet to thousands of people. Computers (windows computers) have increased productivity dramatically since the 80s, so much that the cost of having to modify HTML for IE6 is relatively negligible.

mekoka 15y ago
It's not rational either to only necessarily netting his contribution in the positive. Just ask yourself these two questions and you'll see what I mean. Did Microsoft contribute in advancing certain areas of computing and speed up the adoption of Internet technologies? Did Microsoft contribute in impeding certain areas of computing and slow down the adoption of Internet technologies?
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Surely Microsoft innovated, in a less-than-spectacular way most of the times with things like direct3d, plug-n-play etc. They added tcp/ip stack to windows and created internet explorer, even brought the internet directly to the desktop initially. While they did use their monopoly to push their products thus eliminating rivals, they did not directly block competition. You could still install netscape and windows is still a very open platform. I 'm not going to defend MS monopoly tactics of course, or make a scientific account of microsoft's pros and cons, but Windows had competitors in the open market, and yet they prevailed, not always because they were the better system, but they were not significantly worse than others. Compare that to the oft-praised Apple model: directly block competitors from making similar functionality instead of competing with them and lock people into their systems. Does that model not impede technology from advancing?
  - matwood 15y ago
    like direct3d You just brought up the horrible memories of computer gaming pre-directX/3d. What a mess it was. Wonder if I have a floppy lying around with all my old custom autoexec.bat files? :)
    - jiggy2011 15y ago
      This. I remember having to play games without any sound because I couldn't figure out how to fit the SCSI Hard Disk driver and CD Rom driver and soundblaster driver into the 640k especially since lots of games flat out refused to work if you loaded himem.sys or QEMM which allowed you to load the drivers into the extended/expanded memory areas.
  - hype7 15y ago
    Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL? Plug-n-play? That's a standard? Adding TCP/IP - thanks, Microsoft, for not embracing and extending that one. Internet explorer? Gee, thanks Microsoft for abusing your monopolistic powers to knock out Netscape and start embracing and extending the HTML platform? The best defence you can mount is that they prevailed because they weren't significantly worse than others. That in itself says a lot -- but I'd make the argument they prevailed because they used tactics that make it hard for others to compete (including illegal ones).
    - angelbob 15y ago
      Plug-n-play? That's a standard? It is in the "ISA-compatible hardware that doesn't need jumpers" sense, yes. It has a silly-sounding name, but it's a very specific set of hardware standards. It was a huge, huge advance, speaking as somebody who got multiple graphics and sound cards working, simultaneously, with jumpers, back on an old pre-PnP 486 tower. I literally had a piece of paper with my IRQ and DMA channels and what cards they were assigned to, along with similar mappings for memory ranges, so that I could move the jumpers to reasonable locations for the next piece of hardware I added. If you screwed it up, the new peripheral (and the old one it fought with) just stopped working. And then you got to go remap everything by literally moving a little fiddly piece of plastic from pin to pin on a card you had to open your computer to get at. Plug-and-Play was huge. I originally griped about it too, back when it meant new hardware wouldn't work in my 486 :-P
      - vidarh 15y ago
        Plug-and-Play was a shitty alternative when far superior systems existed on other platforms. Instead they opted for a really horribly limited system. Compare Autoconfig on the Amiga, for example, which was older and provided far more advanced capabilities and was well documented if they could've been bothered to at least copy something that worked well instead of coming up with yet another technically inferior solution.
        WalterBright 15y ago
        I bought one of the early Amigas. They used commodity hardware, but would alter the connector so you had to buy it from them. No thanks.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    Adding TCP/IP to Windows was an innovation? Winsock was pretty much lifted from BSD. The API is so compatible that you can target both with a simple include file to #define away some differences (that's a good thing, but it hardly indicates innovation on Microsofts side), largely because Windows can't easily support the equivalence between filehandles and sockets that implementing the BSD socket API 1:1 relies on.
    - zerostar07 15y ago
      I didnt list it as an innovation. It sped up the adoption of internet technologies.
  - andrewmu 15y ago
    Direct3D was initially much worse than OpenGL, which they saw as a threat because it was cross platform. To this day they are doing something similar with the refusal to adopt WebGL as a standard in their browsers.
- vonkow 15y ago
  The price of cheap hardware was Windows and the price of AJAX was IE6 (5.5, technically). Kinda like roses and thorns, but a lot nerdier.
vidarh 15y ago
Did he help make computers affordable internationally? I have a hard time seeing an argument for this. There was a large selection of alternative OS's in the 80's, and one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition. Gates legacy is becoming more positive, but brushing the negative sides under a chair is revisionism. EDIT: Charming, being downvoted instead of getting a counter-argument. I thought I was on Hacker News, not on Reddit.
- cooldeal 15y ago
  The turning point was when Microsoft licensed DOS to Compaq. This suddenly send hardware prices tumbling and made computers cheap enough to penetrate the corners of the world. This even made Linux possible in the early 90s by leverage cheap hardware. All(or most) of the other solutions were software/hardware tie-ups like Apple and Commodore. Even Apple started taking advantage of this by switching to x86 processors. Also, to MS' credit, they never got tempted to get into the PC hardware market(unlike Google with Android/Motorola) that would've skewed things. If you think Apple's prices are high now, think what would happen if there no other PC OEMs.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    There were several DOS alternatives available. Hadn't Microsoft been there, someone else would have filled that niche quickly. It is simply highly unlikely that removing Microsoft from that equation would have made all that much difference given just how competitive that part of the OS market was.
    - eropple 15y ago
      That's great and all...but they did, not somebody else. Surely somebody else would have eventually written an open source Unix clone. (Probably not GNU, but somebody.) But Linus gets praised for it, and rightly so.
hype7 15y ago
Are you kidding me? He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist, using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things affordable? He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-gotten gains.
- angelbob 15y ago
  As with so many bits of Microsoft history - don't look at what is replacing Microsoft, look at what Microsoft replaced. Think about IBM with a full-on monopoly on both the hardware and software, and what that would have been like instead. Yes. Bill Gates helped make computers affordable.
- westicle 15y ago
  I think everyone understands your point, but for future reference he grew a conscience cf. conscious.
- walkon 15y ago
  Guess how I learned about and downloaded Netscape on Windows back in the mid 90s?
- kamechan 15y ago
  but the central issue in US vs. Microsoft at the time was the bundling of their own browser with their operating system. i'm not saying that there weren't other anticompetitive practices going on at the time. but apple essentially does the same thing with safari, and there are some instances with OSX where one can't override the default browser with another. it's curious that the US gov't isn't going after apple for predatory practices in this case. i guess it's due to the fact that OSX still has a very small market share, overall. but consider another case where it doesn't ... iOS. apple is essentially guilty [to a larger extent] of the same thing microsoft was convicted for. last time i checked, there were no alternate browsers available in iOS because apple's licensing terms strictly prohibit it. the closest anyone has come is opera. am i mistaken?
pg 15y ago
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
- kul 15y ago
  "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements" Nice. Explains Google commoditizing mobile operating systems (complement) to increase demand for their product (search).
  - anon1385 15y ago
    Search is not their product; adspace is.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
rrohan189 15y ago
agree
kabdib 15y ago
The Unix model of innovation didn't work. We wound up with a zillion fragmented versions, and writing applications that had to run on multiple platforms was a terrible, expensive task. There are few companies left from this era; one exception of note is Oracle. It seems that to survive in a "fair" proprietary ecosystem -- please recall that Unix /was/ proprietary in the 80s and 90s -- that you need to be rapacious. Microsoft used E/E/E, predatory dealing with manufacturers and gave out candy to developers, while Oracle followed IBM's old pattern of FUD backed by armies of consultants. Apple barely made it; they were circling the drain when The Chief Jerk returned and started kicking the antheap and killing his predecessors projects. It was a near thing. [Jack Tramiel failed in his attempt to bring Atari back to life in the mid 80s because he mistook 'being aggressively cheap' with being ruthless.] I like the Chief Jerk theory. I've seen a lot of orgs get complacent and consensus-driven and /go under/ because they lose their edge. You need to stay hungry and driven, and one way to get this is to have someone who is not very likeable -- but that you still respect -- at the helm.
- sunchild 15y ago
  "We wound up with a zillion fragmented versions, and writing applications that had to run on multiple platforms was a terrible, expensive task." Sounds like Windows to me.
  - kabdib 15y ago
    No. Not even close. I can still run Windows apps from 1995. Not all of the ones I have, but I'm impressed at what /does/ run. I could probably even make my Windows 3.1 stuff run. The Unix vendors didn't seem to care about this. Oh, there were standards, but they were awfully weak. And when it gets down to doing interesting, useful things, you were sunk when you needed to do cross-platform. There's a lot to be said for having /some/ kind of winner. Though the stuff that goes along with that -- monocultures as a target for malware, corruption in the face of absolute power, etc. -- have to be dealt with somehow. Sheer fragmentation is bad for everybody.
    - trafficlight 15y ago
quanticle 15y ago
I disagree that Gates made computers affordable. Computers were made affordable by Moore's Law. The increasing density of transistors in an integrated circuit made it feasible to simplify circuit boards without sacrificing performance. Indeed, I can argue that Bill Gates made computing significantly less affordable to the international world. Today, the cost of a Windows license can be as much as the cost of the hardware. How many people are being shut out of computing because of the forced subsidies OEMs have to give Windows?

mekoka 15y ago

It's not rational either to only necessarily netting his contribution in the positive. Just ask yourself these two questions and you'll see what I mean. Did Microsoft contribute in advancing certain areas of computing and speed up the adoption of Internet technologies? Did Microsoft contribute in impeding certain areas of computing and slow down the adoption of Internet technologies?

zerostar07 15y ago
Surely Microsoft innovated, in a less-than-spectacular way most of the times with things like direct3d, plug-n-play etc. They added tcp/ip stack to windows and created internet explorer, even brought the internet directly to the desktop initially. While they did use their monopoly to push their products thus eliminating rivals, they did not directly block competition. You could still install netscape and windows is still a very open platform. I 'm not going to defend MS monopoly tactics of course, or make a scientific account of microsoft's pros and cons, but Windows had competitors in the open market, and yet they prevailed, not always because they were the better system, but they were not significantly worse than others. Compare that to the oft-praised Apple model: directly block competitors from making similar functionality instead of competing with them and lock people into their systems. Does that model not impede technology from advancing?
- matwood 15y ago
  like direct3d You just brought up the horrible memories of computer gaming pre-directX/3d. What a mess it was. Wonder if I have a floppy lying around with all my old custom autoexec.bat files? :)
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    This. I remember having to play games without any sound because I couldn't figure out how to fit the SCSI Hard Disk driver and CD Rom driver and soundblaster driver into the 640k especially since lots of games flat out refused to work if you loaded himem.sys or QEMM which allowed you to load the drivers into the extended/expanded memory areas.
- hype7 15y ago
  Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL? Plug-n-play? That's a standard? Adding TCP/IP - thanks, Microsoft, for not embracing and extending that one. Internet explorer? Gee, thanks Microsoft for abusing your monopolistic powers to knock out Netscape and start embracing and extending the HTML platform? The best defence you can mount is that they prevailed because they weren't significantly worse than others. That in itself says a lot -- but I'd make the argument they prevailed because they used tactics that make it hard for others to compete (including illegal ones).
  - angelbob 15y ago
    Plug-n-play? That's a standard? It is in the "ISA-compatible hardware that doesn't need jumpers" sense, yes. It has a silly-sounding name, but it's a very specific set of hardware standards. It was a huge, huge advance, speaking as somebody who got multiple graphics and sound cards working, simultaneously, with jumpers, back on an old pre-PnP 486 tower. I literally had a piece of paper with my IRQ and DMA channels and what cards they were assigned to, along with similar mappings for memory ranges, so that I could move the jumpers to reasonable locations for the next piece of hardware I added. If you screwed it up, the new peripheral (and the old one it fought with) just stopped working. And then you got to go remap everything by literally moving a little fiddly piece of plastic from pin to pin on a card you had to open your computer to get at. Plug-and-Play was huge. I originally griped about it too, back when it meant new hardware wouldn't work in my 486 :-P
    - vidarh 15y ago
      Plug-and-Play was a shitty alternative when far superior systems existed on other platforms. Instead they opted for a really horribly limited system. Compare Autoconfig on the Amiga, for example, which was older and provided far more advanced capabilities and was well documented if they could've been bothered to at least copy something that worked well instead of coming up with yet another technically inferior solution.
      - WalterBright 15y ago
        I bought one of the early Amigas. They used commodity hardware, but would alter the connector so you had to buy it from them. No thanks.
- vidarh 15y ago
  Adding TCP/IP to Windows was an innovation? Winsock was pretty much lifted from BSD. The API is so compatible that you can target both with a simple include file to #define away some differences (that's a good thing, but it hardly indicates innovation on Microsofts side), largely because Windows can't easily support the equivalence between filehandles and sockets that implementing the BSD socket API 1:1 relies on.
  - zerostar07 15y ago
    I didnt list it as an innovation. It sped up the adoption of internet technologies.
- andrewmu 15y ago
  Direct3D was initially much worse than OpenGL, which they saw as a threat because it was cross platform. To this day they are doing something similar with the refusal to adopt WebGL as a standard in their browsers.
vonkow 15y ago
The price of cheap hardware was Windows and the price of AJAX was IE6 (5.5, technically). Kinda like roses and thorns, but a lot nerdier.

vidarh 15y ago

Did he help make computers affordable internationally? I have a hard time seeing an argument for this. There was a large selection of alternative OS's in the 80's, and one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition. Gates legacy is becoming more positive, but brushing the negative sides under a chair is revisionism. EDIT: Charming, being downvoted instead of getting a counter-argument. I thought I was on Hacker News, not on Reddit.

cooldeal 15y ago
The turning point was when Microsoft licensed DOS to Compaq. This suddenly send hardware prices tumbling and made computers cheap enough to penetrate the corners of the world. This even made Linux possible in the early 90s by leverage cheap hardware. All(or most) of the other solutions were software/hardware tie-ups like Apple and Commodore. Even Apple started taking advantage of this by switching to x86 processors. Also, to MS' credit, they never got tempted to get into the PC hardware market(unlike Google with Android/Motorola) that would've skewed things. If you think Apple's prices are high now, think what would happen if there no other PC OEMs.
- vidarh 15y ago
  There were several DOS alternatives available. Hadn't Microsoft been there, someone else would have filled that niche quickly. It is simply highly unlikely that removing Microsoft from that equation would have made all that much difference given just how competitive that part of the OS market was.
  - eropple 15y ago
    That's great and all...but they did, not somebody else. Surely somebody else would have eventually written an open source Unix clone. (Probably not GNU, but somebody.) But Linus gets praised for it, and rightly so.

hype7 15y ago

Are you kidding me? He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist, using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things affordable? He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-gotten gains.

angelbob 15y ago
As with so many bits of Microsoft history - don't look at what is replacing Microsoft, look at what Microsoft replaced. Think about IBM with a full-on monopoly on both the hardware and software, and what that would have been like instead. Yes. Bill Gates helped make computers affordable.
westicle 15y ago
I think everyone understands your point, but for future reference he grew a conscience cf. conscious.
walkon 15y ago
Guess how I learned about and downloaded Netscape on Windows back in the mid 90s?
kamechan 15y ago
but the central issue in US vs. Microsoft at the time was the bundling of their own browser with their operating system. i'm not saying that there weren't other anticompetitive practices going on at the time. but apple essentially does the same thing with safari, and there are some instances with OSX where one can't override the default browser with another. it's curious that the US gov't isn't going after apple for predatory practices in this case. i guess it's due to the fact that OSX still has a very small market share, overall. but consider another case where it doesn't ... iOS. apple is essentially guilty [to a larger extent] of the same thing microsoft was convicted for. last time i checked, there were no alternate browsers available in iOS because apple's licensing terms strictly prohibit it. the closest anyone has come is opera. am i mistaken?

pg 15y ago

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

kul 15y ago
"Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements" Nice. Explains Google commoditizing mobile operating systems (complement) to increase demand for their product (search).
- anon1385 15y ago
  Search is not their product; adspace is.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

rrohan189 15y ago

agree

kabdib 15y ago

The Unix model of innovation didn't work. We wound up with a zillion fragmented versions, and writing applications that had to run on multiple platforms was a terrible, expensive task. There are few companies left from this era; one exception of note is Oracle. It seems that to survive in a "fair" proprietary ecosystem -- please recall that Unix /was/ proprietary in the 80s and 90s -- that you need to be rapacious. Microsoft used E/E/E, predatory dealing with manufacturers and gave out candy to developers, while Oracle followed IBM's old pattern of FUD backed by armies of consultants. Apple barely made it; they were circling the drain when The Chief Jerk returned and started kicking the antheap and killing his predecessors projects. It was a near thing. [Jack Tramiel failed in his attempt to bring Atari back to life in the mid 80s because he mistook 'being aggressively cheap' with being ruthless.] I like the Chief Jerk theory. I've seen a lot of orgs get complacent and consensus-driven and /go under/ because they lose their edge. You need to stay hungry and driven, and one way to get this is to have someone who is not very likeable -- but that you still respect -- at the helm.

sunchild 15y ago
"We wound up with a zillion fragmented versions, and writing applications that had to run on multiple platforms was a terrible, expensive task." Sounds like Windows to me.
- kabdib 15y ago
  No. Not even close. I can still run Windows apps from 1995. Not all of the ones I have, but I'm impressed at what /does/ run. I could probably even make my Windows 3.1 stuff run. The Unix vendors didn't seem to care about this. Oh, there were standards, but they were awfully weak. And when it gets down to doing interesting, useful things, you were sunk when you needed to do cross-platform. There's a lot to be said for having /some/ kind of winner. Though the stuff that goes along with that -- monocultures as a target for malware, corruption in the face of absolute power, etc. -- have to be dealt with somehow. Sheer fragmentation is bad for everybody.
  - trafficlight 15y ago

quanticle 15y ago

I disagree that Gates made computers affordable. Computers were made affordable by Moore's Law. The increasing density of transistors in an integrated circuit made it feasible to simplify circuit boards without sacrificing performance. Indeed, I can argue that Bill Gates made computing significantly less affordable to the international world. Today, the cost of a Windows license can be as much as the cost of the hardware. How many people are being shut out of computing because of the forced subsidies OEMs have to give Windows?